In Past Show

About Bruno Munari

In his prolific, 70-year career, Bruno Munari became known for various contributions to art, industrial design, film, architecture, art theory, and technology—including an early model of the portable slide-projector. He liked to (falsely) claim that his name meant “to make something out of nothing” in Japanese. Munari’s principles and beliefs were built upon his early involvement in the Futurist movement, which he joined at the age of 19 using the pseudonym “Bum.” During the 1930s, Munari began to move towards Constructivism, particularly with his kinetic sculptures, Useless Machines (begun 1933), meant to transform or complicate their surrounding environments. Throughout his career, Munari was captivated by both a sense of whimsy and the manipulation of artificial light. After World War II, Munari also developed radical innovation in graphics, typography, and book publishing, through the latter creating pieces he would call Useless Books.